GBR48 comments

If someone invades your country, target their leader, their government, their regime's financial backers, their military command and control, and their internet backbone. From Day 1. Don't re-run tank battles and trench warfare from WWI whilst your country gets ripped to bits.

It's wise to have an active and growing side-hustle that can be ramped up if needs must. If you simply don't have time for that, you really need to be banking cash each week and paying a mortgage rather than rent.

Spending all the cash you earn each week is a recipe for disaster. Either make a bit more or spend a bit less as an insurance policy. That's extra work or a cheaper property. If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that our jobs can vanish, our careers can vanish, and the economy can collapse at the drop of a hat. There is no quality in the running of nations and nobody is looking out for you. You have to take steps to protect yourself and your family.

@Isabelle.

I love kdrama. Just enjoyed 'Dr. Cha'. All shows won't appeal to all people.. There is a reason why kdrama is so popular. Nobody is forcing you to watch it. Enjoy watching whatever you want to. There is plenty out there.

Blessed be the AirCon manufacturers.

Weather forecasters often use 'windchill' to give a more accurate indication of how cold it will be. They need to start giving a 'skinburn' temperature - how hot it will feel to someone standing in the sun. Because most of us do not spend our days inside a Stevenson screen. Last year the BBC were talking about a record 40C temperature, whilst my outdoor thermostat was recording over 50C.

Note that the natural world will cope with this a lot better than us. Biodiversity will reduce to a core of hardy species. Tests have suggested that more CO2 will see greater growth in plants, especially trees. Species will move around (shockingly, across borders, without visas). Seed variability and production will adapt. At the risk of sounding a bit Gaia, the world has heated up and frozen before and will cope just fine. Humanity maybe needs to spend more time and money finding ways to protect itself.

I've written novels and drama and nothing I've seen produced by AI to date worries me. I'm also not worried about AI being trained on my own work. Poets might need to worry, but that's not new. 80s software and most Eng. Lit. students are capable of writing decent enough modern verse.

Even if AI improves, it would just be more competition, and there is stacks of that already. The real value of a high profile publisher is getting your work (good, bad or indifferent) on to the shelves of a bookshop and advertised via BookTok/TV reading groups. There are better books that you won't see or read, and worse ones that you will, simply because most people are led to titles by publishers. And yes, people do judge books by their covers (and their blurbs). If you want to know why some books appear on book shop shelves and others don't, srudy the industry (the literary section of 'Private Eye' being required reading). The publishing industry is way more toxic and manipulative than AI. Publishers (and authors) will exploit AI more than AI will exploit copyrighted fiction.

'Men Behaving Badly', 'Fawlty Towers', 'Allo, Allo', 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum', faithful adaptations of classic novels, Carry On movies, Mel Brooks movies. Pretty much everything I enjoyed in the 80s, including earlier shows like 'I Dream of Jeannie', 'Tarzan' and 'Bewitched'. But that's OK. Most of it is available on DVD. And thankfully, we now have Kdrama, which is blissfully good.

Obey the local rules or pay the fine. The organisers should be able to recoup their cash from their insurer, who would in turn sue the band in the UK to recover the cash. If the insurance doesn't cover it, the organisers would have to sue them in the UK. They would have to pay, as the legal system is not a moral arbiter. They signed a statement to say that they would not do this, and did it. Breach of contract. Legal slam dunk. Tourist or working, obey local laws.

A deflationary spiral is better than an inflationary spiral. Be careful what you wish for.

Property is big in China, so negative equity is going to be really brutal. The eye-watering debts of some of the property companies are going to be a problem.

Trade under threat. China will have to face off with the US, or Washington will simply isolate it using trade blocks.

Quote: increasingly authoritarian efforts to control Chinese society...

Complete BS. The US and EU have traded and allied with murderous and brutal dictators whenever there was something in it for them. They are simply using this to initiate a new Cold War to protect their creaking economies.

The two things that MAG in the 20thC, uber alles, were WWII and the Cold War. Having an external enemy is the only thing that might dampen America's internal political divisions. Trashing the RotW again in a new World War would MAGA in the view of both US parties. Given climate change and weapons tech, especially hypersonic and bio, it probably wouldn't work so well this time round, but politicians do like to fall back on what once worked for them.

China's biggest problem may be internal domestic economic issues and the trouble they may cause. A bit of popular aggro ended their Covid Zero policy. Xi is embracing ideological policies with the zeal of a true believer, but the newly consumerised Chinese public will not cheerfully return to being penniless labourers for the glory of Communism. There must be some factional splits in the CCP. Things may get interesting.

quote: one of the most famous sporting people in the world.

He seemed like a pleasant chap, but I had not heard of him before. The NFL is not that big in the UK.

quote: I think in the US a court can force all kinds of actions that the kid will find unpleasant.

And you think that creates happy, well-rounded, well-adjusted members of society?

A % of kids have been cheating for years. Using AI, they are more likely to get caught than by getting someone to write their paper for them. Using pen and paper in an exam room or classroom should be fine, assuming kids can still write with a pen. For homework, just get them to learn stuff.

Learning how to cheat may prepare you for a career in politics, but for anything else, maybe consider your education as an opportunity to acquire knowledge and develop skills, rather than just an annoying barrier to your inevitable greatness. Once in work, time and opportunities to improve your skills and knowledge can be limited.

quote: Universities are like the music industry when Napster came along.

Not quite. Unis are repositories of knowledge, resources and opportunity. But they will need to up their game in offering value for money and shifting from long courses in terms to shorter full year courses. That's a good thing. People are paying too much for traditional uni courses.

The basic concept of sharing office space was and is fine. The implementation was a financial horror show. The decision to purchase by Softbank was comparable to Musk's purchase of Twitter. Due diligence exists for a reason.

I'd love AirCon. Just need it in one room to cool the entire house by enough.

If you don't keep your home cool, it may be impossible to store medication safely. If it says 'Do not store in a fridge. Do not store above 25C', what do you do when every room is over 30C?

An ad is an ad. It is there to sell stuff. It doesn't matter what content it appears near. If you get a better deal per view, you may as well advertise on an adult site. Customers are customers, whatever their interests. And the targeting of ads, as promised by certain tech entities, is rarely worth the extra.

Some of these companies may be using this as a cover to reduce ad spending as the economy is tanking. The Musk soap opera really doesn't matter. As long as the platform is getting clicks, its an advertising medium. And one still used by most governments.

It really depends upon what works best for the job and the individual. There are issues of data security too. I'm sure the Yaks would find it easier to peep over the shoulder of someone with access to banking and health records, working in their apartment, than if all the terminals were in restricted-access office space.

The chaos of a storm is a good cover to overthrow a dictatorship.

I've been posting on here for a couple of years that the next big thing in tech would be a switch to distributed systems. Nice to see it finally beginning to happen.

I would however warn about polluting a sound tech with what passes as 'AI'.

Theatre, as it won't make any difference. And a mechanism for leveraging the Cold War 2 split between BRICS and NATO, that may end the global nature (and raison d'etre) of the UN. The UN have been conned into undermining themselves. You can't have a proper world war unless you have divided the planet in two. Wagner is offering support to those on the BRICS side of the fence, NATO for those wanting to stick with the West. Having lost Afghanistan, CAR and Niger, and facing a forever war stalemate in Ukraine, it's not going so well for the West. Resource-rich nations are lining up behind BRICS. The US will be OK, but its allies are going to feel the heat. Not least Japan, as it increasingly looks like Taiwan will be the political football the split/WWIII kicks off with. Being a US ally means buying lots of US-made military gear, so time to get the chequebook out for NATO members, affiliates and wannabes.

Quote: The cash-strapped Japanese government turned down the museum's request for more funding, and is even reducing its subsidies

Meanwhile, at the Ministry of shiny war toys...

Japan's Defence Ministry to seek record ¥7 tril budget for FY2024.

Nothing requiring [300 megajoules of] energy and infrastructure can be said to be carbon free.

After all the lies about nuclear fission (cheap, clean, safe), we should be honest about nuclear fusion from the start.

quote: 0.3 percent drop in China's July consumer prices.

I'd be happy with a 30% drop in prices, back to where they were pre-Brexit.

Most commenters believe that things with develop progressively - faster, better, newer. I wish I shared your optimism.

Given the state of the environment, the increasing militarisation - preparations for war, and return to a cold war, with reduced access to food, goods, chips and the 'war on plastic', what comes next may well be a lot less technologically impressive than what we have today.

Maybe the Philippines could get a bigger water pistol than the Chinese.

I'm sticking with DVDs. I am relaxed about consciously uncoupling from the industry.

Nigeria were better than England. One on one, England couldn't get past them. They were as poor as they were in their first two games - slow, sloppy and ineffective going forward. Both sides had a shout for a penalty - giving neither was fair. Manager Randy got his tactics right.

Not sure if it is a mentality issue for England or they just don't have the fitness levels to cope with a fast side. The Nigerians got to every ball first in a straight dash, and persistently won aerial balls. It was a clear red card for James. No excuses.

The new rules for penalties reduce the mobility of keepers. There is now less benefit in risking missing by booting it really hard. Penalty competitions are now being lost on misses. Getting the ball on target may now be more important.

Watched the first half. The US have been below par and were again, but were showing signs of life. Sweden were also poor, repeatedly making a hash of the basics. One of the Swedish women got an elbow in the face just before half time. Not so much as a card, so I turned it off. Checked back and was surprised it had gone to extra time. The shoot out was certainly dramatic. I don't think I've seen a VAR decision on a penalty before. The graphic is machine generated and gave the ball as about 1mm behind the line. Sweden are usually better than that, but if they don't rediscover their old form, Japan should be fine.

It was Delcampe. https://www.stampboards.com/viewtopic.php?t=102550

If states have different rules, they will have to be listed as if they are different countries.

US states are now suppressing online activity and tech for everything from abortion to sales tax. Internet companies are going to have to stop listing the US as a single entity and divide it up into states. There are some online services that have had to stop selling to all US addresses, as individual states have imposed specific additional sales taxes with complicated prepayment requirements. The US is no longer 'one nation' but 50 states, as different from each other on major social and economic issues as individual countries. It is moving in the opposition direction to the more federalised EU.

The last 20 mins of some of those games were brilliant to watch. Typically 10 mins either side of the 90.

SA/Italy was remarkable, for the quality injury time winner and for the OG.

Credit to teams like South Korea who gave it everything to the last minute in bruising encounters, despite being already out.

quote: About one in 10 U.S. households have no air conditioning.

95%+ of UK households have no air conditioning.

In heat waves, I put cardboard up at the windows to stop the sun heating the air in the rooms and only cook with a microwave or an electric steamer. It's cooler to sleep downstairs on a damp towel.

Fans only blow air over your skin, although that offers some relief. Keep an evaporative air cooler supplied with ice cubes or ice packs if you have one.

Thankfully we got lucky in the last month with cooler, wet weather.